Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries Part 2 Pages 51-117
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"Long waves beat diagonally against the beach, bulge hunchbacked with cords of muscle, raise quivering ridges that tip over at their very greenest. Crests stretched tight, already welted white, wrap around a cavity of air crushed by the clear mass like a secret made and then broken. The crashing swells knock children off their feet, spin them round, drag them flat across the pebbly ground. Past the breakers, the waves pull the swimmer across their backs by her outstretched hands. The wind is fluttery; in low-pressure wind like this, the Baltic Sea used to peter out into a burble. The word for the short waves on the Baltic was: scrabbly."
Please join us in a continuation of our series on the Prague Spring with a read through of Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries over the next year.
From the NYRB site:
Late in 1967, Uwe Johnson, already one of the most celebrated German novelists of his generation, set out to write a book that would take the form of an entry for every day of the year that lay ahead. The first entry is August 21, 1967, and every subsequent entry is dated the following day, through August 20, 1968. Of course, Johnson had no idea what the year would bring—that was part of the challenge—but he did have his main character: Gesine Cresspahl, a German émigré living on the Upper West Side of New York City and working as a translator for a bank, who is the single mother of a ten-year-old daughter, Marie.
The book tells the story of a year in the life of this little family in relation to the unfolding stories of the year, as winnowed from the pages of The New York Times, of which Gesine is a devoted if wary reader. These stories in turn are overlayed by another: Gesine, born just as Hitler was coming to power, has decided to tell Marie the story of her grandparents’ lives and of her own rural childhood in Nazi Germany.
Anniversaries courts comparison to Joyce’s Ulysses, the book of a day, and to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the book of a lifetime, but it stands apart in its dense polyphonic interplay of voices and stories. It is a novel of private life, a political novel, and a new kind of historical novel, reckoning not only with past history but with history in the making.
Please read pages 51-117, September 7, 1967-October 2, 1967.
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